Rostrum

Tom Holland on Thucydides and the plague at Athens

The latest episode of our coronavirus podcast features Tom Holland on the plague that changed the course of ancient history. Holland is a historian, novelist, and the best-selling author most recently of Dominion, a history of the revolution Christianity wrought in world history. He is also the translator of a widely acclaimed version of Herodotus’s Histories. We spoke with him about another chronicler of the ancient world, Thucydides — who detailed how a plague almost destroyed Athens in his History of the Peloponnesian War— and what we moderns can learn from Thucydides on this question.